Essay

The Sound and the Fury

There is a lot of talk these days about angry, raging youth. The reason people are so fond
of talking about them is that, from the aimless riots of Swedish adolescents to the
proclamations of Englands would-be literary movement, the Angry Young
Men, there is the same utter innocuousness, the same reassuring flimsiness. Products
of a period in which the dominant ideas and lifestyles are decomposing, a period that has
seen tremendous breakthroughs in the domination of nature without any corresponding
increase in the real possibilities of everyday life, reacting, often crudely, against the
world they find themselves stuck in, these youth outbursts are somewhat reminiscent of the
surrealist state of mind. But they lack surrealisms points of leverage in culture,
and its revolutionary hope. Hence the tone underlying the spontaneous negativity of
American, Scandinavian and Japanese youth is one of resignation. Saint-Germain-des-PrÈs
had already, during the first years after World War II, served as a laboratory for this
kind of behavior (misleadingly termed existentialist by the press); which is
why the present intellectual representatives of that generation in France (Françoise
Sagan, Robbe-Grillet, Vadim, the atrocious Buffet) are all such extreme caricatural images
of resignation.

Although this intellectual generation exhibits more aggressiveness outside France, its
consciousness still ranges from simple imbecility to premature self-satisfaction with a
very inadequate revolt. The rotten egg smell exuded by the idea of God envelops the
mystical cretins of Americas Beat Generation and is not even entirely
absent from the declarations of the Angry Young Men (e.g. Colin Wilson). These latter have
just discovered, thirty years behind the times, a certain moral subversiveness that England
had managed to completely hide from them all this time; and they think theyre being
daringly scandalous by declaring themselves antimonarchists. Plays continue to be
produced, writes Kenneth Tynan, that are based on the ridiculous idea that
people still fear and respect the Crown, the Empire, the Church, the University and Polite
Society. This statement is indicative of how tepidly literary the Angry
Young Mens perspective is. They have simply come to change their opinions about a
few social conventions without even noticing the fundamental change of terrain of
all cultural activity so evident in every avant-garde tendency of this century. The Angry
Young Men are in fact particularly reactionary in attributing a privileged, redemptive
value to the practice of literature, thereby defending a mystification that was denounced
in Europe around 1920 and whose survival today is of greater counterrevolutionary
significance than that of the British Crown.

In all this pseudorevolutionary sound and fury there is a common lack of understanding
of the meaning and scope of surrealism (itself naturally distorted by its bourgeois
artistic success). A continuation of surrealism would in fact be the most consistent
attitude to take if nothing new arose to replace it. But because the young people who now
rally to surrealism are aware of surrealisms profound demands while being incapable
of overcoming the contradiction between those demands and the stagnation accompanying its
apparent success, they take refuge in the reactionary aspects present within surrealism
from its inception (magic, belief in a golden age elsewhere than in history to come). Some
of them even take pride in still standing under surrealisms arc de triomphe,
so long after the period of real struggle. There they will remain, says Gérard Legrand
proudly (Surréalisme même #2), faithful to their tradition, a small band
of youthful souls resolved to keep alive the true flame of surrealism.

A movement more liberating than the surrealism of 1924  a movement
Breton promised to rally to if it were to appear  cannot easily be formed because
its liberativeness now depends on its seizing the more advanced material means of the
modern world. But the surrealists of 1958 have not only become incapable of rallying to
such a movement, they are even determined to combat it. But this does not eliminate the
necessity for a revolutionary movement in culture to appropriate, with greater
effectiveness, the freedom of spirit and the concrete freedom of mores demanded by
surrealism.

For us, surrealism has been only a beginning of a revolutionary experiment in culture,
an experiment that almost immediately ground to a practical and theoretical halt. We have
to go further. Why is becoming a surrealist no longer a meaningful option? Not because of
the ruling classs constant encouragement of avant-garde movements to
dissociate themselves from the scandalous aspects of surrealism. (This encouragement is
not made in the name of promoting originality at all costs  how could it be, when
the ruling order has nothing really new to propose to us, nothing going beyond surrealism?
On the contrary, the bourgeoisie stands ready to applaud any regressions we might lapse
into.) If we are not surrealists, it is because surrealism has become a total bore.

Decrepit surrealism, raging and ill-informed youth, well-off adolescent rebels without
perspectives (though certainly not without a cause)  boredom is what they all have
in common. The situationists will execute the judgment that contemporary leisure is
pronouncing against itself.